Eagle-eyed Wellesnetter Terry Wilson spotted what appears to be previously unknown outtakes from Orson Welles’ 1947 film The Lady from Shanghai at a non-profit digital library.
A reel of black-and-white footage associated with producer William Castle and Columbia Pictures was uploaded by A/V Geeks to the Internet Archive, archive.org/details/pet1089r5, back in August 2019. Castle was an uncredited script writer and second unit director on The Lady from Shanghai. He also served as an associate producer.
The footage appears to feature Rita Hayworth as Elsa Bannister, Glenn Anders as George Grisby and Welles as Michael O’Hara.
“Extraordinarily rare takes of Elsa following Michael as he flees through Chinatown (with Welles’ double thoroughly unconvincing — his gait is all wrong), a few tantalizing seconds from what should be the long sequence of Michael and Grisby climbing the hill, and second-unit stuff of the Circe sailing past,” Wilson noted on the Wellesnet Message Board.
The footage also includes a film slate bearing the names of Welles and cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr.
The five and a half minutes of Shanghai outtakes is preceded by four and a half minutes of seeming unrelated footage of a fire at what has been described as a US Army surplus warehouse, followed by scenes of people rushing down a staircase. (More than one film lover has suggested to us that it comes from the 1948 Columbia Pictures comedy The Fuller Brush Man.)
The theatrical release version of The Lady from Shanghai has a running time of 88 minutes, though Welles’ rough cut reportedly ran considerably longer before cuts were ordered by Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn.
Wellesnet has edited the five and a half minutes of Shanghai footage from the Internet Archive reel and uploaded it to YouTube. It can be seen below or at youtu.be/5gbFOwTrJPE.
(Editor’s note: Shortly after we posted this, David Wiegleb, a volunteer at Prelinger Archives in San Francsico, informed us via Facebook that he scanned stock footage from The Lady from Shanghai. Much of the footage was shot in Acapulco and the San Francisco Bay area. The most interesting shot was an alternate take of Grisby’s body in the streets. Quite a number of William Castle slates could be seen in the Acapulco footage.)
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